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Prog 2044 - The Magic is back

Started by Eamonn Clarke, 13 August, 2017, 04:17:27 PM

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Taryn Tailz

Really love that cover. Perfectly captures the spirit of the strip itself.

Colin YNWA

Late reader in this case. Just home from a week camping and read the Prog this evening, don't know what everyone else's excuse is! Anyway its a fine one it is too under the already mentioned wonderful cover.

Dredd has an action packed conclusion, with some wonderful moments and most excitingly what feels like a set up for the return and showdown with Vega. Fingers crossed its soon as she's a fantastic foil for Joe.

Grey Area too concludes sublimely and again while this story is great its all about the set up and what a set up it is. On reflection it could be said to be cliche but when the execution is this good who cares and showdown two feels set up. This one starting in 2050 one hopes when Grey Area returns.

Alienist is good but feels to leap forward from last weeks episode which felt more of a cliffhanger than was really delivered. That said what is delivered is mighty fine.

AND continuing the theme Greysuit (I always want to add an 's' on the end of that) finds fresh ways to present its violence mixed with polemics.

Hope has to of course win me over all over again. Not sure what the reasons for the delay are but its killed momentum in a story that feels like its all about the flow and timing of what unfolds. Certainly even with a recap the story has been done no favours and we'll see how it develops but this episode felt a little stilted and indugent but had enough to keep me looking forward to seeing more so fingers crossed.

So yeah the Prog seems to have stunned folks into silence, its not that good but its good and only 6 issues until we get a relaunch. Good times.

Richard

Hope is worth re-reading and it was only six episodes. Not too much time, well spent.

IndigoPrime

Still Progless here. Rare for a Monday. Oh well. (Got the Meg on Saturday, at least, and the JDMC to tide me over!)

dweezil2

No Prog until Wednesday for me, bu hot damn that cover is fantastic!

Great to see Hope back so soon, loved the last series.  :)
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Rara Avis

Oh my, look at that pretty cover. One more sleep ...

IndigoPrime


The Corinthian

Is it just me or does anyone else get an "early Vertigo miniseries" vibe from Hope?

Colin YNWA

Quote from: The Corinthian on 16 August, 2017, 08:45:51 AM
Is it just me or does anyone else get an "early Vertigo miniseries" vibe from Hope?

Nuns in gas masks - hell yeah that so early Vertigo it's verging on cliché.

Frank

QuoteDredd encounters another (writer's) character ... It's an uneasy meeting of equals, since the other writer can't bear to imagine that their character is anything less than a match for Dredd.

Gordon Rennie, Meg 213

Paradox Vega isn't just a match for Dredd, she saves the hapless clod, who then tells the reader her how "impressive" she is. This is a character who was introduced [1] by a crowd telling the reader how much they love her. Ouroboros [2] was an okay story and she's a fun character, but the hard sell was misjudged.

This week's theme is inspiration. Last week, someone wrongly described Grey Area as a thinly veiled commentary on the Mediterranean refugee drama, but it is, in fact, a dramatisation of media/social media commentary on the refugee crisis.

Queen Of Mean Grell is only a 'machine gun the cockroaches in the water' away from being Katie Hopkins, who he sort of resembles [3], but his vocabulary ('snowflake, BEM(lib)tard') is that of the alt-right keyboard warrior.

If Abnett's cheating by mining his twitter feed for dialogue, Mills is copying and pasting found text from the online résumés of private security contractors. As Colin YNWA points out, provided that's used as a counterpoint to action scene visuals - in the same way Savage and Defoe have been blowing Volgans/zombies away to out of copyright ballads - it's actually entertaining.

Oakeshott's Dave Cameron pig smear makes its second appearance between Tharg's covers, in what only a year ago would have been a topical reference. Sir Giles's malapropisms have made me realise I've been reading Greysuit all wrong - it's more Alan Ayckbourn than Jason Bourne. Carry On MK-Ultra.

If those two are torn from (last year's) newspaper headlines, Tharg's other offerings tread the path more often taken of plundering other genre fiction for inspiration. As noted, Hope's John Constantine [4] in Ellroy's 1° from reality version of the post-WWII media landscape.  Hopefully that Big Numbers bar scene saved Broxton enough time to catch up with his schedule.

Speaking of Moore, last week's scene of Reggie on the M6 was only an exclamation of 'your women barely conceal their sexes, yet this elicits not a flicker of response!' away from the most celebrated use of magic ritual to offer a Victorian gent an unsettling glimpse of the present day. Jahbulon!

The arrival of Boushh suggests the strip is about to deviate from its original premise - Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley's Without A Clue, where an alcoholic ham actor (also called Reggie) is hired as a front for a detective - to incorporate the central gimmick of Galaxy Quest - where a drunken ham actor is mistaken for the character he portrays by aliens in need of a saviour.

Whether you prefer the (almost) topical approach taken by the first two strips to the genre recombination of the other two depends on whether you think one idea for a story is trumped by two ideas (even if those ideas belong to other writers). Hopefully, like other 2000ad stories that took familiar elements from other media as their starting point, these strips will find their own distinctive voices.


[1] Prog 2016

[2] That portentous title proved to be misdirection for a plot about ear wax. My only problem with the story is that if Dredd had played no part in it everything would have worked out just the same (better, even). Vega tails Tom from the club onto the zoom, follows him onto the ghost train, then sneaks up behind him and kicks him in the head. The finale taking place on a train was appropriate, because Dredd's been a passenger throughout.

[3] Although the always entertaining Mark Harrison character casting game reveals Grell to be played by Band Of Brothers and Walking Talls' Neil McDonough.

[4] The nun/gas mask visual aesthetic suggested to me a cross between Vertigo's Sandman Mystery Theatre and Ennis/Ezquerra's Helix series, Bloody Mary

The Corinthian

Quote from: Colin YNWA on 16 August, 2017, 11:56:36 AM
Quote from: The Corinthian on 16 August, 2017, 08:45:51 AM
Is it just me or does anyone else get an "early Vertigo miniseries" vibe from Hope?

Nuns in gas masks - hell yeah that so early Vertigo it's verging on cliché.

It's not just the story though, it's the art style, the setting and the use of captions. I can't decide if its a conscious pastiche or not.

norton canes

Cover: Excellent, particularly the colouring.

Dredd: Not a bad conclusion, a shame that the story centred around a throwaway joke though - was expecting some higher stakes.

Grey Area: With that mention of 'snowflake', the strip manages to unexpectedly wrest the most shoe-horned political comment of the week award away form Greysuit. Apart from that, a bit by-the-numbers - looking forward to its return though.

The Alienist - Bubbling along nicely. Great mask.

Greysuit: Mills, you old dog - those CV captions were the best moment of the prog. Chapeau.

Hope: Excellent stuff, Tharg clearly has big plans for this strip if the interview with Guy Adams in anything to go by. Sure, there are familiar tropes in ply but it;s definitely more than the sum of its parts.

I did find it strange that Cabe suddenly gets a detailed, narrated introduction - her name wasn't even mentioned in the first instalments, was it? I kind of expected her back story to be drip fed. Still, I'm sure there's plenty more to be revealed.


Overall a pretty great line-up, so disappointed that Grey Area won't be part of it for a few weeks. Do we know what's lined up to take its place? Future Shocks? 

IndigoPrime

Still nothing here. That's the second missing item in a month, after issues arriving like clockwork for ages. Boo and hiss.

Tjm86

Quote from: Frank on 16 August, 2017, 05:42:22 PM
Ouroboros [2] was an okay story and she's a fun character, but the hard sell was misjudged.

Quote from: Colin YNWA on 13 August, 2017, 09:39:59 PM

Dredd has an action packed conclusion, with some wonderful moments and most excitingly what feels like a set up for the return and showdown with Vega. Fingers crossed its soon as she's a fantastic foil for Joe.

Personally, I got the impression that Carroll was hoping that none of us had seen Zootropolis.  Bit of role reversal with Dredd as the hapless bunny cop and Vega as the wily, scheming fox.  Reading the ending it is hard not to miss the parallels and be disappointed.  To be frank I'm thinking of another interpretation of that title and it's not particularly flattering.  Perhaps if it had been played more for laughs and / or the humour was a bit more overt it would have worked better.  I think the conflicting opinions about Vega sums up the character perfectly.  The handling leaves a lot to be desired at present.